Peace Talks in Wartime Are Tough: Why Do They Begin So Late in Battle?

By Joseph Mazur 

The only way wars end is either by mutual agreement or by overwhelming death and destruction.

We no longer live in an age of tribal isolation. Our global connections call for skilled leaders to get us through years of wars that have ultimately become mutual agreements of how much death and destruction is affordable. The countless challenging problems we face can be solved only by alliances and partnerships in recognition of conflicting governmental systems. Belligerencies between and within states may be how the world works, but they also damage the essentials of keeping the planet alive. With so many think tanks focusing on military and war-negotiating government strategies, why do we not have the intelligence to know how to stop wars before they start? And why do our long wars so often continue in battle without significant negotiations for peace? Without serious offers at balanced peace tables, wars, deaths, and destruction will continue serving no one.

War appears to be, or threatens to be, not so much a contest of strength as one of endurance, nerve, obstinacy, and pain. It appears to be and threatens to be, not so much a contest of military strength as a bargaining process – dirty, extortionate, and often quite reluctant bargaining on one side or both – nevertheless a bargaining process. – Thomas Crombie Schelling^[2]

How can two enemy countries find ways to follow their opposing governmental systems and still find their ways to peace? When negotiations work, they tend to do so at a cost far lower than war. Going back in the history of civilization, we learn that more wars are stopped than started because there were influential people, diplomats, ambassadors, religious and nongovernmental leaders wise enough to counterbalance difficult belligerencies through intelligent negotiations. The Punic Wars (Rome vs. Carthage) had a de jure (legally recognized) duration that continued for two millennia and were finally settled in 1985 by the smart mayors of modern Rome and the Municipality of Carthage, who signed a peace treaty and accompanying pact of friendship.^[3] Yay! And wow! Finally, reconciliation! The two cities are officially making peace through the sensibility of a symbolic end.

Stopping a war faces gusts of arms-dealing headwinds; sometimes the diplomacy battle must be stronger than the war itself because, as I pointed out in my WFR article “Why Are There So Many Wars, Especially Now? An Obscure Brilliance of Arms Dealing Keeps Wars Coming”, that arms production, sales, and trade rise to sustain wars that go well for one side or another.^[4] The people and companies that benefit from wars – the arms dealers, manufacturers, politicians, and public investors – are the tempests battling negotiations. Wars happen and continue for longer periods than planned, partly because of a profitable weapons industry supported by powerful influence.

The wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq did not go as planned. Deaths and injuries were higher than war planners approximated as “worth it” numbers. Some weapons then were mostly conventional, yet sophisticated and available from terrorist states and black markets. More than 3.1 million civilians and fighters were killed in the Vietnam War. But the number of casualties in subsequent wars (in Afghanistan and Iraq) is far smaller, though more difficult to estimate. From 1964 to 1968, Vietnam War diplomacy was a cycle of discussions about adding another round of endless talks. The first secret talks between the United States and North Vietnam began in 1968, with no agreements before 1973. Diplomatic intent was the veneer of meetings for peace, mostly talking about talking. President Lyndon Johnson told reporters at a press conference in 1965, “We are ready now, as we have always been, to move from the battlefield to the conference table. I have stated publicly many times, again and again, America’s willingness to begin unconditional discussions with any government, at any place, at any time. Fifteen efforts have been made to start these discussions with the help of 40 nations throughout the world, but there has been no answer.”^[5] Regrettably, Hanoi and the U.S. could not agree on the plans of peace talks, so neither side was willing to bargain. Even at that preliminary stage, as brutal fighting continued, the “battle of the tables” was world news for ten weeks; the delegates on both sides could not agree on how the meeting would be held, the shape of the conference table, whether there would be more than one table and, if so, where they should be. After weeks of deliberation between round and triangular, the shape became circular.

The Afghanistan war went on for 17 years before any serious negotiations were in place. Sure, there were on-and-off negotiations in peace deals all that time, and meetings to amplify agendas for more meetings. But it was not before 2018 that serious high-level talks began when the U.S. offered a ceasefire and a withdrawal of troops in exchange for Taliban commitments to block international terrorist groups from operating in Afghanistan. After the U.S. announced an agreement with the Taliban, who were committed to the agreement, just six months after being inaugurated, President Trump abruptly called off the peace talks.^[6] Finally, on February 29, 2020, an agreement for bringing peace to Afghanistan was signed to give “guarantees and enforcement mechanisms that will prevent the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies,” with a commitment to a later-date negotiation for a ceasefire.^[7]

One should ask why a modern war should go on for almost two decades without much interest in peace negotiations. One must question: How can military conflicts continue without the peace-table arguments behind the reasons for combat? Even families know that their disputes are better handled by conflict-resolution therapy. I am going all out to answer. As I pointed out in my TWFR article “Why Are There So Many Wars, Especially Now?”, wars happen partly because of a profitable weapons industry supported by powerful influence. More than ever, “battlefield performance is a sales convention where weapons are on display.” ^[8]

These days, weapons can be bought wholesale from dealers and terrorist states. Drones are made and sold by unlicensed civilians who manufacture their goods in hidden garages. The collapse of the Soviet Union left only one superpower in charge of the limited conflicts between small coalitions of states and non-states. The sudden rise of terrorism shortly before and after 9/11 brought us the “war on terror” that built shadow wars with almost no diplomatic contact between enemies. Major wars were about terrorism, not entirely about territory expansions or regional influence, though some were surely about ideologies and political theater.

Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, dramatically reshaping global foreign affairs by limiting direct negotiations for peace and inspiring Iran to support the Hamas terror attack on Israel, which in turn brought on the massive reaction loops of destructive revenge and thereby broadened the reprisals between multiple states and non-state combatants. WWI brought collaborations between countries with serious intentions for peace, not tight alliances for wars. In the Soviet Union days, the world took solace in knowing there was a hotline between the nuclear superpowers; two of the most powerful leaders, we believed, were rational enough to agree on a diplomatic solution to save the world from its most feared ending. My most optimistic senses tell me that that old hotline still exists – as it did during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis – but I have no confidence that the folks on the line now care about anything other than themselves (especially now that Donald Trump is the U.S. President-Elect). Though I hope the hotline is real, it stands metaphorically as an exit to the risk of spiraling conflicts, a de-escalating trigger that keeps each side of a conflict from crossing dangerous brinks.

Are wars avoided through negotiations of appeasement?

Wars of the past were more problematic than those happening now. Think of WWII, when Hitler, following diplomatic rules when they suited him, signed treaties and heedlessly broke them. These days, treaties are bargained through the United Nations, which has charge of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. When the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, signed an agreement that permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, that too was diplomacy but leaning on capitulation. Comparing Hitler’s Fall Grün (Case Green – the Nazi Party plan to invade Czechoslovakia) with Putin’s Special Military Operation, we find remarkably tight similarities. Fall Grün was partly an excuse for war, starting with an invasion of the Sudetenland, a portion of Western Czechoslovakia with close to three million inhabitants, many of whom spoke German or were of German descent, some following Konrad Henlein, a Sudeten-German, who organized the Sudeten-German Home Front that called for the German annexation of Czechoslovakia.

Putin’s “Special Military Operation” excuse centered on freeing Russian inhabitants in Crimea, who were Russian organizers and agitators planted in eastern Ukraine to disrupt political activities. An emergency diplomacy meeting of representatives in Munich went well for Hitler. Sudetenland, a mountainous natural defense borderland for Czechoslovakia’s protection against the Germanic States, was given to Germany by a capitulating agreement signed by France, Britain, and Germany.  

Figure 1: 

Sudetenland was Czechoslovakia’s protection against Germany, comparable to what would later become the Soviet Union’s protective border, the Eastern Bloc countries of Europe that were aligned strategically, economically, militarily, and politically with the Soviet Union before its collapse. It also compares with smaller reasons for the Russian invasion of Ukraine to rebuild the Eastern Bloc. 

It is well-known history that tells us that Chamberlain believed that war would be avoided if Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten geographical block were transferred to Germany. For Hitler, it was a gain, under the optimistic belief that war would be avoided if Germany’s condition of bringing ethnic Germans back to German dominion would appease the Third Reich. Some of the most expert critics of the “Chamberlain Appeasement,” including Churchill, argued that WWII could have been avoided had Britain prevented the German buildup of armaments in 1936.

Laying the blame for World War Two goes back to World War One.

Few wars are won only by a total defeat of one side. Most end with diplomatic packages ordering ceasefires, armistices, or overwhelming political fatigue. Others, excluding internal hot ones after WWII, have ended in ceasefires or backing out. In the last three decades, there were at least “2,202 ceasefires across 66 countries in 109 civil conflicts involving 4,091 declarations by 469 different governments and non-state armed groups” arranged through unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral agreements.^[9] It follows that diplomacy can play a role in preventing wars. Ceasefires, though, do not always hold for long, because the end of one war connects to reasons for another. WWII had links to WWI. The Korean and Vietnam Wars both have tentacles stretching from WWII. Wars are not simple. They are not easily stoppable, even with the best intentions on both sides. World War II never seriously negotiated a settlement less than unconditional surrender, partly because everyone involved knew that Hitler could not be trusted.

A.J.P. Taylor, a British historian, journalist, and broadcaster to millions through his television lectures, was a specialist in European diplomacy. In his book The Origins of the Second World War, published in 1961, he wrote that diplomatic mistakes on both sides caused WWII to explode the way it did. Most modern historians differ from Taylor’s reasoning, which downplays Hitler’s antisemitism and Nazi ideology while putting some blame on the Allied powers. In Taylor’s view, the war would have ended differently had America not intervened; that is certainly true. The problem, the way some historians saw it, along with Taylor, was the U.S. policy of permission for Hitler to rearm and build a successful propaganda machine that took in luminaries such as Charles Lindbergh and many Berlin-paid Nazis in the U.S. Congress (see Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra)^[10]. Taylor wrote, “No one is to blame for this. It is very hard for a democracy to make up its mind: and when it does so, often makes it up wrong.”^[11],^[12],^[13]

The secret message

In 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a message of concern about Hitler and Mussolini to Neville Chamberlain. He offered an agreement on disarmament, treaties, and access to raw materials for Germany and Italy in exchange for protecting countries that were likely to be taken over by invasions. Imagine how the world would have changed had Roosevelt’s offer been accepted. We know that it would not have been accepted, because we also knew that Hitler would never have stood by his word. Roosevelt’s offer to Chamberlain was a powerful concern for Europe. Chamberlain trusted Hitler and “feared that Roosevelt’s proposed initiative would offend [Hitler and Mussolini] and cause Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement to collapse.” So, he rejected Roosevelt’s offer. But Hitler planned the war, probably not expecting it to be another world war. There was no alternative, either to appease or go to war. Hitler would accept both war and any gifts of territory that could go along with a signed agreement. Appeasers could claim that concessions would have been wise and could have been successful “if it had not been for the unpredictable fact that Germany was in the grip of a madman.”^[14]

Shortly after the rejection of Roosevelt’s offer, Hitler invaded Austria. And soon after Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, permitting German annexation of the Sudetenland, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and later Poland, and Mussolini invaded Albania. Not yet by definition a world war, Britain and Germany were at war. The world would be drawn in later. Would Roosevelt’s offer work to avoid a world war? No one can say. However, history tells us that letters with novel ideas can change the world. At this moment, I can think of none.^{[15], [16]} “The greatest charge against Chamberlain has been that he always thought that he was right and that those who disagreed with him were wrong.” Kenneth Harris, a British journalist working for The Observer wrote those words in a 1985 New York Times article.^[17] It is a tricky assessment of a leader. In a democracy, we elect leaders who we trust to have all the answers to avoid bad conditions for their constituency. Regrettably, there are no such leaders and never have been. We do not elect robots, yet, and in almost every instance of history, despots in authoritarian countries care less about their legacies than their personal gain. They certainly do not have the answers for keeping their countries safe and prosperous. “If valid,” Harris continues, “it was tragic that a man cursed by such myopia decided to deal with monsters like Hitler and Mussolini single-handed.”

Now, why do I dwell on Chamberlain’s regrettable mistake? In this long article about diplomacy, it is just one diplomatic error among many. But it was a mistake that cost more lives than any other, including the WWI mistakes that could have avoided that war.

History gives us the stories that we need so we can learn or relearn what we should have remembered to solve future problems. We render our versions as awareness of the past. Some as hearsay, some as tales with a spin to favor a side. Others are narratives that fall into the archives without verification. We absorb and mix them into the chowder of our opinions. We tend to believe chronicled histories, especially when sanctioned by the renowned among us, whoever they may be. I say this with an awareness that we now live in an age when truth is taken lightly with a hedge on compelling evidence. As a writer, I spend my time searching for evidence in thoughts and in storytelling that dominates all the documents I comb. I am not a historian, so all the truthfulness I search for must be corroborated by multiple sources.

There are calls for Ukraine to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia – lessons learned after Chamberlain’s 1938 blunder dampened Western Europe’s thoughts of peace through diplomatic negotiations. Currently, there are no peace negotiations in place. However, ever since the Ukrainian military advanced into Kursk, inside Russian territory, peace talks may have a peace table foothold. Will negotiated diplomacy satisfy Putin, or does he have a “Sudeten-like” plan to go after more territory in Latvia or Estonia? We don’t know; the conflict shows no signs of slowing down, and with no peace table set for negotiations at this date, there is little hope for peace.

If we go back further, history tells us of how diplomacy works or doesn’t. There were many diplomatic accords surrounding trade and industry. The Organization of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) is just one. Diplomacy of military buildups and war are central to my theme. So, taking us back in time, far before our world wars, we come to a stage of civilization that, by the historical record, founded the relatively late idea of diplomacy. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, the diplomacy trick was to use marriages as peace-protection alliances. Diplomatic marriages were expedient peace opportunities. The pharaohs of Egypt cleverly used diplomatic marriages with other dominions. Ramesses II had eight wives, two of them Hittite princess sisters to unite an alliance and to form a peace treaty in 1258 BCE with the Hittite Empire (modern Turkey).

Behold then, Khetasar, the great chief of the Hittites, is in treaty relation with Ramses II, the great ruler of Egypt, beginning with this day, in order to bring about good peace and good brotherhood between us forever, while he is in brotherhood with me, he is in peace with me; and I am in brotherhood with him, and I am in peace with him, forever.^[18]

Going back another millennium, say to the 24^th century BCE, we come to the Cone of Entemena, a cone-shaped terracotta cuneiform treaty agreement describing a generation-long struggle over that land along the Tigris and Euphrates and setting a prescribed boundary between Lagash and Umma. The Cone is what historians believe to be the first legal diplomatic document in recorded history.^[19] As the clay tells us, a peace treaty marked an established brotherhood between two ancient city-states, Lagash (today called Al-Hiba) and Uruk (today called Warka). Here is an extract from the inscription translated from Sumerian cuneiform.

For Inanna and Lugal-emus Entemena ruler of Lagas the E-muš, their beloved temple, built and ordered (these) clay nails for them. Entemena, who built the E-muš, his god is Shul-utula. At that time, Entemena, ruler of Lagaš, and Lugal-kineš-dudu, ruler of Uruk, established brotherhood.^[20]

The cuneiform foundation nail was inscribed with the peace treaty between Lagash and Uruk: “Those were the days when Enmetena, ruler of Lagash, and Lugal-kinishe-dudu, ruler of Uruk, concluded a treaty of fraternity”. (English)

Cone of Entemena mentioning the alliance with Lugal-kinishe-dudu This file is made available under the Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication My source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cone_of_Entemena_mentioning_the_alliance_with_Lugal-kinishe-dudu.jpg

States then were relatively small in population and geography, so secure relationships with neighbors were critical for survival and steady connections were essential for fruitfulness. That said, I found little evidence regarding war diplomacy between the 12^th century BCE. cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian close enough to the era of Ramesses II and the 7^th century AD, when there is far more evidence of peace treaties signed on parchments.

Later, Mesopotamian peace treaties were negotiated through marriages. Diplomatically arranged marriages were common in the ancient Near East in the Bronze Age. Later still, the Greek city-states had diplomats, as did the Roman Republic. Diplomacy then was mostly through representatives who carried gifts, works of art, jewelry, and innovative tools to bribe rulers into alliances, peace treaties, or trade agreements. Greek and Roman alliances happened a long way back in time. Countries are too big and powerful these days when allegiances work only by collective security. Of course, diplomacy erratically continued for 26 centuries, sometimes by dynastic marriages, gift-giving, or simply by messengers traveling on foot or by donkey.

Collective security

Ten years after the United States won its war of independence from Great Britain, under a diplomatic pull into potential European wars, President George Washington declared his country to be a neutral nation. Ten years after that proclamation, the Napoleonic Wars were in full force. With neutrality being a bit lopsided toward France, the United States slipped into its first war since being independent. Few Americans know about that war because there is a tendency to know about wars occurring in one’s lifetime. I was a very young child when WWII ended and certainly knew nothing about WWI before reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August in my late adulthood. The college students I taught 20 years ago knew nothing about the war in Vietnam, and many high school students today know nothing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but do know a great deal (though confused by misinformation) about the current wars involving Ukraine and Israel. 

Let’s go back a bit to the War of 1812. It did not last long. Wars in the nineteenth century were fought in hand-to-hand combat using small arms, muskets, pistols, sabers, and short-range cannons that had to be reloaded in the face of an ongoing battle with little body protection from cloth uniforms. Soldiers on both sides were battle-worn and fatigued by suffering, pain, and misery. So, yes, combat was brutal, though disease was the primary cause of death.

It was British impressment, the blocking of U.S. trade lanes with France, and Britain’s support of Native Americans that started the war, but the treaty that ended the war, the Treaty of Ghent, recognized that the war was a tie, at least in territorial procurement, and so it established that the war was status quo ante bellum (a stalemate restoring the pre-war borders). Prisoners of war were released and territory captured by one side was returned to the other. From that end, and from that treaty, the United States won a commercial boom from the reopening of trade lanes and better relations with Britain and Canada that lasted for over 200 years. One might say that the Treaty of Ghent, and possibly the war itself, was a gift to all by diplomacy.

Pierre Berton, a twentieth-century Canadian historian specializing in nineteenth-century wars wrote:

“It was as if no war had been fought, or to put it more bluntly, as if the war that was fought was fought for no good reason. For nothing has changed; everything is as it was at the beginning save for the graves of those who, it now appears, have fought for a trifle… but without the gore, the stench, the disease, the terror, the conniving, and the imbecilities that march with every army.”^[22]

The Treaty of Ghent was a diplomatic adeptness that turned the United States into a significant economic and political powerhouse of American expansion at the expense of indigenous extirpation. In the early decades following the War of 1812, wars, purchases, and diplomacy enriched the country through a bonanza of new territories, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas.^[23]

Diplomacy in the form of peace talks almost always happens eventually in war. Some talks are pretenses for public acceptance of war; others are more genuine. The Korean War was in full battle for a year before any agreement of peace talks. It took eight years for Iran and Iraq to sit at a peace table to finally resolve the First Gulf War in 1980. Successes are measured historically by outcomes. A ceasefire, armistice, recognized stalemate and, more rarely, an estimated recognition of risk, as in the number of deaths and loss of equipment at stake.  Or we can hope that future peace talks will model the brilliance of the “Pig War”, a military conflict between the U.S. and Britain (1859) “over a squabble of a pig” in which there were no human casualties on either side.^[24] The Pig War was over almost before it started, but diplomatic envoys, at their tasks of preventing or ending wars in the second half of the nineteenth century, were overwhelmed by territorial and rebellion conflicts involving intolerable numbers of combat deaths that continued through the nineteenth century.

Intolerable, yes. But nowhere near the numbers that would follow in the next century.  

“We declared war because we were bound by treaty to declare war… We began to fight because our honour and our pledge obliged us; but so soon as we are embarked upon the fighting, we have to ask ourselves what is the end at which our fighting aims.” – H.G. Wells, The War That Will End War.^[25]

The roughly 20 million WWI deaths dramatically changed diplomacy. Agreements that were strictly between nations were broken at will and circumstance. The world war brought new ideas for peace settlements that were flimsy at best and biased at worst. The League of Nations, a dream of peace after a world fatigue of war, began as a glorious collective security organization with virtually no enforcing body able to answer complaints of the Geneva Conventions of 1864 and 1906. The International Committee of the Red Cross, a neutral medical force, was the enforcer and protector of the sick and wounded combatants. The League, a negotiating body to prevent future wars through a collective security surveillance group, became a negotiating body encompassing 43 founding states in 1920. Conceptually, it was a new idea spawned from the massive numbers of WWI deaths (between 15 and 22 million).

Take the 1919-20 Paris Peace Conference, which started near the Quai d’Orsay in Paris and moved to the Royal Palace of Versailles for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The conference was a meeting to settle the international peace after World War I. Starting on January 18, 1919, before any organized collective alliances, it followed several armistices in Salonika (Thessaloniki), Bulgaria, Turkey, Austria-Hungary Germany. It ended as an authentic treaty, later called the Treaty of Versailles, a collective security grouping of 30 nations, including the UK, the U.S., France, and Italy. The Paris Conference created six dovetailed treaties, starting with Versailles and ending with the Treaty of Sèvres, the treaty that dismantled the Ottoman Empire by distributing its territory by mandates to France, the UK, Greece, and Italy, thereby drawing new national boundaries. The unfortunate result was a section of the treaty that blamed Germany for starting the war and held Germany accountable for reparations.

The gathering in the picture above makes peace treaties seem simple. However, the 30 delegates to the signing did not give an impression as to how many dignitaries were involved in working out the agreement and wording of the final treaties at the end of the war. Hundreds were involved. Not an easy outcome for either side.

Misguided negotiations, especially collective security ones, can cause serious problems. The Paris Peace Conference’s formula for the final treaties that ended the war blamed Germany and did nothing to help it recover. Military historians push the notion that anger brought the Nazi Party to right-wing power and the next world war.

In hope of world peace

On January 8, 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress intended as an outline for peace negotiations once World War I was ready for its dénouement. His speech included 14 points drafted by over 150 political and social scientists who analyzed thousands of maps and documents involving economic and political data to present to the peace conference. The fourteenth point proposed a radical idea: the League of Nations, a politically independent collective security organization with a mission of world peace.

Point 14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. ^[26]

However, the Treaty did not accept Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which some historians agree to be “the most powerful expression of the idealist strain in United States diplomacy.”^[27] Let’s remember that the U.S. became a superpower only after committing itself to fight on the side against Germany, demonstrating that its industrial weight was significant and, therefore, its influence on the world stage of diplomacy. Wilson’s speech was not just a spark for the idea of the League of Nations; it led to a remapping of Europe that bore inventive notions of U.S. foreign policy, international relations, national sovereignty, trade agreements, and diplomacy.

One must ask: How is it that the assassination of one man – even if Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne – led to the war? The other Central Powers on the German side signed separate treaties. That war, the war that was to end all wars, brought us the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Paris Peace Conference, the Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, the 1995 Dayton Accords, and now the hope for peace talks over the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. 

The wars of this century. How could endings be negotiated, or will one side have to capitulate?

The big wars of the world explode just about every hundred years. For twelve and a half years, starting on May 8, 1803, Europe went through the Napoleonic wars. Two world wars exploded a century later. For exactly six years, starting on September 1, 1939, Hitler’s wars devastated Europe and significant parts of the world’s continents. Today, a century later, we are at it again with Eastern Europe and Middle East wars. Yet we now have the United Nations as our collective security that has enormous legal powers and few enforcement powers to bring to peace the most volatile excuses for war. The United Nations was chartered to, as it says, “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” As General David Petraeus wrote in the first chapter of his notably insightful book Conflict, “the hope of mankind was that invasions and warfare might be abandoned as a way of solving international disputes. The universal cry of ‘Never Again’ applied as much to the practice of invading countries as to the monstrous crimes of the Nazi era. It was as noble as it was naïve.”^[28]

Let’s not forget that even after the end of the war that killed 60 million people and the slogan “Never again,” we continued to have multiple cross-border warfare, not just skirmishes that have lasted for almost 80 years, since the British partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and the Palestinian Mandate. In those 80 years, there have been close to a hundred serious diplomatic attempts to settle “again and again” disputes.

Diplomatic miscalculations

Less than a week after the U.S. began bombings targeting military camps in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden in return for an end to the bombings. According to the Public Papers of the President of the United States, George W. Bush, there was an exchange between reporters and the President as they returned to the South Lawn at the White House from Camp David on October 14, 2001.^[29] In the exchange, the President is referring to Osama bin Laden as “him”, leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

Q: Mr. President, there’s a new offer from the Taliban to turn over bin Laden. What’s your response to that, sir?

President: Turn him over. Turn him over; turn his cohorts over; turn any hostages they hold over; destroy all the terrorist camps. There’s no need to negotiate. There’s no discussions. I told them exactly what they need to do. And there’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty. Turn him over. If they want us to stop our military operations, they’ve just got to meet my conditions. Now, when I said no negotiation, I meant no negotiation.

Q: You reject his offer?

President: I don’t know what the offer is. All they’ve got to do is turn him over, and his colleagues and the stocks he hides, as well as destroy his camps, and the innocent people being held hostage in Afghanistan.

Q: They want you to stop the bombing and see evidence.

President: There’s no negotiation – they must have not heard – there’s no negotiation. This is non-negotiable. These people, if they’re interested in us stopping our military operations – we will do so if they meet the conditions that I outlined in my speech to the United States Congress. It’s as simple as that. There’s nothing to negotiate about. They’re harboring a terrorist, and they need to turn him over – and not only turn him over, turn the al-Qaeda organization over, destroy all the terrorist camps – actually, we’re doing a pretty good job of that right now – and release the hostages they hold. That’s all they’ve got to do, but there is no negotiation, period.

In 2001, when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and sheltered al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, a U.S.-led military coalition attacked the Taliban. After the first 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. decided it was time to negotiate peace. An Afghan High Peace Council was established with a U.S. understanding that dealing with the Taliban would go nowhere, though significant gains from a surge and backing from the tribal elders made a timely peace deal possible. But 10 years?! There had been replicas of peace negotiations, but not with the advisory players. In 2010, NATO held a summit suggesting a transition of all areas to Afghan control, but that summit was never meant to offer a serious peace proposal. Diplomatic hopes and reach-outs were ready for action at the beginning of the big wars of the mid-twentieth century. As for the Afghan war, there were neither preparations nor feelers for a peace table for the first 10 years. But the hopes for negotiations died when news surfaced that Pakistani officials were not part of the plan. Because of that, the Taliban suspended the talks. On-and-off preliminaries to consolidating members for a peace table continued for two years before the Afghans took over the provinces between 2012 and 2014 with NATO and U.S. forces, and when then-President Obama announced a withdrawal of U.S. troops but leaving a relatively small security force. The full withdrawal took six more years, bringing the total Afghan soldier death account to more than 66,000. In February 2020, the U.S. signed an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw international forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. The NATO Allies had already decided to withdraw their troops. They did so a few months later. In the end, the Afghans could not hold their territory and, as NATO and the U.S. pulled out, the Taliban returned. In the almost 20 years of that war, the longest war in the military history of the U.S., 3,621 NATO soldiers died and 20,769 were wounded in action. What was it all for? Wars are like that. They are sometimes fought for good reason, sometimes for revenge, and sometimes by misunderstandings that could be resolved diplomatically. When a war continues for almost 20 years, it obligates leaders to offer off-ramps from the first assault to the last, because people die or lose body parts, to say nothing of the mental damage that comes with witnessing combat. 

In 2020, U.S. officials and representatives of the Taliban began having direct talks in Doha with Afghan officials for a U.S. exit in agreement that Afghan territory would not be used by terrorists or foreign militants posing security threats to the world. It was phase one of an uncertain and thorny process that one year later resolved the conflict peacefully by permitting the Taliban to succeed. But it was the beginning of the end of America’s longest war. In February 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed an agreement on the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan by the following May. A few months afterward, NATO forces withdrew. The agreement was between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (a state not recognized by the U.S. as a state) and guaranteed, along with enforcement mechanisms, the prevention of “the use of the soil of Afghanistan by any group or individual against the security of the United States and its allies.”^[30]

For almost 20 years of struggling through deals with the Taliban, the U.S. was hooked on a purely military solution to the war. Negotiating a peace agreement with terror organizations misses opportunities for peace. Regrettably, the U.S. was never serious about a peace process until it was too late. It had a chance for peace talks when it achieved offerings early on, since the Taliban offered to surrender in exchange for amnesty.  The U.S., focused on a decisive military victory against the Taliban, rejected the offer. An openness to that rare diplomatic opportunity could have narrowed two decades of war to one and saved countless lives.

After over $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan – a cost that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan – for two decades – yes, the American people should hear this: $300 million a day for two decades. So, what is the cost of having a continuous peace negotiation for 20 years? ^[31] 

Was it smart to not negotiate at the 10-year mark of the war? A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs shows us that the U.S.-led post-9/11 wars killed over 900,000 people and cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion, not just $2 trillion if we add the opposition fighters, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian aid workers.

“The deaths we tallied are likely a vast undercount of the true toll these wars have taken on human life,” said Neta Crawford, a co-founder of the project and a professor of political science at Boston University. “It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of the many U.S. wars and counterterror operations since 9/11, as we pause and reflect on all of the lives lost.”^[33]

Given that report, one wonders if it was wise not to accept negotiations at a time when so much killing and destruction could have been avoided. And as for cost, taking the Project’s estimate of $8 trillion, it was $1.2 billion per day, a staggering amount! At a daily diplomatic negotiating cost of far, far less, the war would have ended early in its first 20 days, rather than years after achieving its goal. My estimated cost of negotiations is less than $100 thousand per day; that’s eight-thousandths of one percent of the daily cost of that war. However, 20 days would not have been enough for NATO’s gamble with, on the one hand, its calculated odds of victory and, on the other, a winning bargaining position.  

With so many think tanks linked to government-awarded contracts for war-related intelligence think tanks, we must wonder how we still lose the battle between peace and war when many of those tanks are research institutes focusing on political, military, and war-negotiating government strategies. Some government strategies work. We know that many truces in this century came through unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral agreements. Larger countries at war, though, are troubled by locked ideals that are not so easily negotiated.

The newest brutal wars of attrition

According to the Geneva Academy of International Law and Human Rights, there are at this moment more than 42 wars and so-called “armed conflicts”^[34] on four continents happening at the expense of an average of 166,000 deaths per year and 3,287,478 cumulatively for just six of the more than 40 ongoing wars.^[35] The actual numbers are much higher. The International Committee of the Red Cross counts over 120 ongoing armed conflicts worldwide.^[36] The Sudanese and Myanmar civil wars are the most brutal internal ones, with no impending resolutions. They are complex, as all civil wars are. Here, we concentrate on the two most recent explosive international wars.

Europe and the Middle East are missing opportunities for peace as they fall into the typical strategic war games of diplomacy shaping, with each side waiting for the best time advantage for the best peace offer.

Five peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in the first year of the war were extraordinary in that the later ones happened as face-to-face meetings between high-level ministers of Russia and Ukraine. Most peace talks go through diplomatic paths facilitated by third-party states. Meetings did happen in March 2022, when the Russian advance was waning. Meetings began in Belarus and Turkey, with a framework for a settlement drafted with the hope of a treaty signing, partly because the war was not going so well for Russia.^[37] Two months later, battlefield conditions realigned, and Western weapons support gave Ukraine enough confidence to believe it could win the war. So, as almost always happens with imbalanced belief in odds, the talks broke down. It was the last face-to-face meeting, offering no agreements to end the fighting.^[38]

The Belarus / Turkey (then called the Istanbul Communiqué) meeting came close to a signed treaty that would have ended the fighting. Officially, it was called the Treaty on Ukraine’s Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees. That treaty, drafted on April 15, 2022, was never implemented because it put heavy obligations on the West. Seven states would act as guarantors required to assist Ukraine. It was “in the event of aggression, any armed attack on Ukraine or any military operation against Ukraine, each of the Guarantor States” will assist Ukraine, taking whatever action necessary. The problem was that necessary action included the possibility of closing airspace over Ukraine, providing weapons, and using armed forces “to restore and subsequently maintain the security of Ukraine as a permanently neutral state.”^[39] Surely, it was a non-starter. First, it obligated the U.S. to go to war with Russia in the event of another Russian invasion of Ukraine. Second, the Russians would not accept wording in the treaty giving Ukraine “the right to individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.” Third, the Ukrainians objected to the wording that guarantors would decide independently whether to come to Ukraine’s defense. The Russian view was to subvert the article based on agreements between all guarantor states. Even now, two years later, Putin does not want to negotiate a ceasefire agreement because he needs to show his country that his costly invasion has a purpose, “to destroy Ukraine as a nation.”^[40] For that to happen, he cannot negotiate peace. Ukrainians remember the 2015 ceasefire under capitulation after Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, which broke in the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion. So, for a peace treaty to succeed, Its articles must include tight security guarantees that would force a ceasefire to hold. Such a treaty could happen as battle fatigue lingers another year. As for now, though, there is no deal. And so it goes: Ukraine will not sign a peace agreement that does not guarantee its security, and Russia will not sign if it does.

New meetings have been stalled for 32 months since the last unsigned April 2022 treaty, with no suitable approaches for a settlement, even though it seems clear that that war, like so many others, will end in negotiations. If the war continues without significant battlefield advantages on one side or the other, neither side will talk of peace while hoping for some gain for a settlement. Samuel Charap, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Sergey Radchenko, Research Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Foreign Affairs, “What happened on the battlefield is relatively well understood. What is less understood is the simultaneous intense diplomacy involving Moscow, Kyiv, and a host of other actors, which could have resulted in a settlement just weeks after the war began.”^[41]

In a recent Ukrainian radio interview, President Zelenskyy said, “From our side, we must do everything so that this war ends next year and ends through diplomatic means.”^[42] A few days before, Vasily Nebenzya, Moscow’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said that Russia would be open to negotiations to end the war if Ukraine would acknowledge “realities on the ground.” ^[43] Does that open another peace talk? That is not likely if realities on the ground force Ukraine to give up 20 percent of its territory with no permanent security guarantees. And so, as of this writing, the war in Ukraine war continues open-endedly with no open bilateral or multilateral negotiations in the face of more than one million casualties from both sides. ^[44] Still, there is new hope for an imminent settlement because each sees the delicate business of negotiating with what it might have of value to craft somewhat of a win and save face.

Differently, the other international hot war, the Israeli-Hamas War, the fifth and largest one between Israel and Hamas that has been raging on and off for the last 15 years, has negotiated now and then dismissively from almost the beginning, with just one ceasefire and hostage release talk sponsored by independent state mediators. Qatar has been playing a sensitive role in multilateral negotiations ever since October 2023, when the war in Gaza began. It is strikingly unusual for peace negotiations to begin so near a war’s start. A month later, Qatar brokered a temporary ceasefire that released 105 of the 251 civilian hostages taken on October 7, 2023.

As of this writing, Qatar has withdrawn as the mediator for the conflict because both sides refused to negotiate in good faith. In mid-October, during an earlier round of peace talks in Doha, Hamas held its position for negotiation as a complete end to the war and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, with no short-term ceasefire. For more than a year, the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar have tried to broker a ceasefire, all unsuccessful because one or the other combatant states has not been ready. It is a show of strength that must emerge on one side for the other to agree to negotiate in good faith when the odds are not high for victory but best for avoiding heavy losses. Israel has also rejected deals. In November, Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a peace deal because he would not consider a ceasefire if talks aimed against Israeli control of Gaza’s border with Egypt. So, with two sides unwilling to sit down together because of the overwhelming obstinacy of agreements, peace cannot happen. 

The good news is that negotiations can work to bring wars to peace. While writing this column, a ping on my laptop called me to read an announcement that Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal. The Israeli security cabinet voted in favor of ending the fight between Israel and Hezbollah, at least temporarily, since, as with every battle in the Near East, nothing is certain. It is a remarkable achievement, though – five stars for the persistent negotiating spirit.

Still, the Israeli wars with its Palestinian adversaries will continue for as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is the Israeli Prime Minister and Mahmoud Abbas remains the president of the Palestinian Authority. Both leaders are corrupt and ineffective in winding down the constant aggressions that only serve to hurt their people. A move closer to stopping the Gaza war and freeing the hostages is unlikely. A lasting peace is hopeless under the obstacles of Netanyahu and Abbas’s counter-position leaderships and impossible with their disregard for the lives and needs of Israelis and Palestinians and without the creation of a Palestinian state. For the sake of the Israeli / Palestinian future in peace, there must be a change in leadership.

States at war tend to continue their battles without seriously considering negotiated settlements. Once a war is active, the fight becomes a bargaining contest, with each side in mutual mistrust of the other, hoping to get a favorable peace agreement. The fate of war is a high gamble, but so is the timing of negotiations. Killing and wounding are costly war concerns, partly because they spark a persistent cycle of revenge that swells the expense and partly from mistakes on the battlefield or early estimates of achievements. Active wars always have reasons to continue with strategic diplomacy plans as soon as the other side seems ready to make an acceptable offer to open communications. Negotiating is difficult when both sides are optimistic that their odds of winning are high enough for an advantage. Battlefield engagements measure true odds based on relative strength, as revealed in battlefield successes. Negotiation is often just a waiting match. Punishing the other side enough to cede a few bargaining chips is a wise strategy, especially when there is an opportunity for bargaining for peace. Suspicion of inclination to talk is often seen as a weakness of resolve, even a form of surrender. So, negotiation settlements are strategic games of timing that weigh between the price of war and the odds of winning. Without serious offers and a balance of determination, both sides wait for the best time to accept a seat at the peace table. Nations at war want victory without destruction, which translates to bargaining power; yet when negotiations are too late to favor one side or another, war and all its death and destruction end, having served no one other than weapons dealers and manufacturers.

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

Follow his World Financial Review column at https://worldfinancialreview.com/category/columns/understanding-war/. More information about him is at https://www.josephmazur.com/

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